Derivatives

husbander

With backgrounds in document management, librarianship, and archiving, the herders, hoarders, and husbanders of documents see these activities as the keys to managing knowledge.

A husbander, not a squanderer, of resources, which is a good attitude to have at the very beginning of a long, possibly endless, campaign.

Retiring in disposition, and a rigid husbander of time, Mr. Hall holds himself aloof from all literary societies, and has from the first persistently avoided all entanglement with cliques and coteries.

Origin

Late Old English (in the senses 'male head of a household' and 'manager, steward'), from Old Norsehúsbóndi 'master of a house', from hús 'house' + bóndi 'occupier and tiller of the soil'. The original sense of the verb was 'till, cultivate'.

In Old English a wife was simply ‘a woman’, and a husband was ‘a male head of a household’ or ‘a manager or steward’, a sense preserved in expressions such as to husband your resources. The word is from Old Norse húsbondí ‘master of a house’. Not until the 13th century or so did a husband become the married partner of a woman. Around then the word also took on the meaning ‘a farmer or cultivator’ and also the verb use ‘to cultivate’, both of which are no longer used but are preserved in husbandry (Middle English), ‘the cultivation and care of crops and farm animals’.